Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-unix!ctnews!pyramid!hplabs!hpcea!hpda!hpsmtc1!dlw
From: dlw@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (David Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: EtherTalk vs. LocalTalk on Mac II
Message-ID: <11540122@hpsmtc1.HP.COM>
Date: 4 Feb 88 18:09:36 GMT
References: <9414@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 31

>Bill Leue writes:
I talked to a technical support person from TOPS (was Centram, now part of
Sun) today.  I was interested to find out if TOPS supports a Mac II 
equipped with an EtherTalk card as a gateway machine from Ethernet to
LocalTalk.  (If it could work, it would be an alternative to buying a
Kinetics box, since we already have the Mac.)  She said that they do NOT
support this configuration.  She also said that part of the reason is that
Apple has told them that if you plug an EtherTalk card into your Mac II,
you can't use the LocalTalk ports at all!

Has anyone heard of this limitation before?  Mail replies to me and I will
>summarize for the net.

Hmmmm, I think what she means is that you can only have Ethertalk or LocalTalk
active at any one time. The serial ports still function while ET is active, 
but they can not run Localtalk at the same time as ET is running. Essentially
you activate ethertalk by choosing the Network icon in the control panel,
Apple provides a CDEV for this with the ET card and you select if you want to
run "built in" (which is localtalk) or the EtherTalk stuff. So plugging in
an Ethertalk card does not blow away use of Localtalk.

Hope this clears things up! Now when is the version of Tops with NFS support
coming out? (read about it in infoworld so it must be tru 8))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
David L. Williams
dlw@hpda
Hewlett Packard, Cupertino Ca
Software Development Technology Laboratory
Distributed Computing Environment Project
Mailstop: 47LR
"Sinanju, buddy -- the real stuff"